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Lot Essay
In the summer of 1880 Gauguin moved his family to 8, rue Carcel, in Vaugirard, a suburb of Paris, where they sublet a house from the painter Felix Jobbé-Duval. Gauguin was employed by the Thomereau agency, which bought and sold insurance company stocks. He painted and sculpted in his spare time, and began to collect Impressionist paintings and regularly spend evenings at the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes. It was there that he met Manet, Degas, Renoir and Pissarro. He was invited at the last minute to show a sculpture in the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879, and participated in the fifth group show with seven paintings and a marble bust of his wife, Mette, the following year.
The present painting shows part of the large garden behind his house at rue Carcel, and is one of several views that the artist executed in this secluded and congenial space. In the fall of 1881 he painted Mette and three of his four children in the garden (Wildenstein, no. 70; coll. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen), with the nearby L'église Saint-Lambert visible in the background. On the next block, rue Blomet, the Limoges porcelain maker Haviland opened a pottery works that after 1883 was directed by Ernest Chaplet, a master ceramicist. In 1886, when Gauguin began to make pottery to supplement his income, he turned to Chaplet for guidance, as he did again in 1894 when he was working on his great stoneware sculpture Oviri and related works (see lot 203).
The present painting shows part of the large garden behind his house at rue Carcel, and is one of several views that the artist executed in this secluded and congenial space. In the fall of 1881 he painted Mette and three of his four children in the garden (Wildenstein, no. 70; coll. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen), with the nearby L'église Saint-Lambert visible in the background. On the next block, rue Blomet, the Limoges porcelain maker Haviland opened a pottery works that after 1883 was directed by Ernest Chaplet, a master ceramicist. In 1886, when Gauguin began to make pottery to supplement his income, he turned to Chaplet for guidance, as he did again in 1894 when he was working on his great stoneware sculpture Oviri and related works (see lot 203).